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Founder of Amnesty International dies, aged 83

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Saturday, February 26, 2005 The founder of Amnesty International, Peter Benenson, passed away last night after suffering for some time from a serious illness. At age 83, it is forty four years since he founded Amnesty as a result of reading an article about the imprisonment of two students in Portugal who had drunk a toast to liberty.

Amnesty International said they will be holding a public memorial service and there will be private ceremony for family members however there will be no funeral service. Amnesty International's current Secretary-General, Irene Khan, said after his death: "Peter Benenson's life was a courageous testament to his visionary commitment to fight injustice around the world."

The organisation was initially formed in 1960 for "a one-year campaign for the release of six prisoners of conscience." Today Amnesty has over 1.8m members and campaigns for human rights on a global basis. Mr. Benenson was originally trained as a lawyer before he dedicated his life to the promotion of human rights.

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This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
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